From death row to freedom: Rodricus Crawford looks to future

Rodricus Crawford, 28, is free after spending almost three years on Death Row at Angola.
(Henrietta Wildsmith and Sarah Crawford)

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Rodricus Crawford, 28, is free after spending almost three years on Death Row at Angola. He maintained his innocence after being convicted in 2013 of killing his 1-year-old son. After the Louisiana Supreme Court vacated his conviction, the Caddo District Attorney’s Office announced it will not retry Crawford for the crime.(Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)Buy Photo

The 28-year-old Shreveport native, who was convicted of his child’s murder and sentenced to die, now has a free life ahead of him after his conviction was vacated and the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office announced it will not retry him for the crime.

“I’m just trying to get on with my life from now on,” said Crawford, who has always maintained his innocence. “I got five years taken away from me.”

The saga began on Feb. 16, 2012, when 1-year-old Roderius Lott was found unresponsive in the home that Crawford shared with his grandmother, mother and other relatives in Mooretown.

“I woke up and found him, ran and took him to the ambulance,” Crawford said in an interview Thursday. “When he left my hands, my whole world changed.”

After handing over his son, Crawford said, he was placed into the back of a police car. It was there he was told by his son’s mother that the baby had died.

“When it first happened, I didn’t really want to live anymore,” he said. “Who can deal with that: waking up, your son passed, you go to jail, and they’re saying you did it?”

In April of that year, Crawford was charged with first-degree murder. The prosecution said the baby had been smothered, while the defense’s expert testified that Roderius died of pneumonia and sepsis.

Crawford was convicted in November 2013 and sentenced to death. He was transferred to death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he spent almost three years as attorneys appealed his case.

At Angola, which has come under fire for its alleged “dehumanizing” conditions in a class-action lawsuit filed by death row inmates, Crawford said the heat was so bad that he felt like he was in a locked car.

“You feel like an animal, period,” he said. “It’s all a mind game. … You can go crazy. Not ‘can’ – you’re going crazy.”

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Rodricus Crawford, 28, is free after spending almost three years on Death Row at Angola. He maintained his innocence after being convicted in 2013 of killing his 1-year-old son. After the Louisiana Supreme Court vacated his conviction, the Caddo District Attorney’s Office announced it will not retry Crawford for the crime.(Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

Being in prison and awaiting possible death “messed with me,” he said.

“Who can imagine an innocent person being on death row, and they talk about killing you, and you wake up in a little cell every day?” he said. “Imagine that. I can’t explain it. That’s a feeling I hope nobody could feel.”

Though in a cell for 23 hours a day, Crawford said, he still was able to connect with other inmates, several from Shreveport and some of whom he believes are innocent.

“I can honestly say I met some stand-up guys that taught me a lot,” he said. “I didn’t expect it to be like that, but we really look out for each other because you’re in this tier with 16 guys, all day, every day.”

Meanwhile, he drew attention from national media as one of several cases that allegedly highlights the high number of death penalty sentences in Caddo Parish. Crawford said he was aware of the “headlights” his case was putting on Shreveport, and he began receiving mail from people around the country and Canada.

“After The New Yorker (article) came out, a lot of people were writing me and showing me a lot of love,” he said. “The letters meant a lot.”

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Cecelia Kappel, an attorney for Rodricus Crawford, is with the New Orleans-based Capital Appeals Project.(Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

One of Crawford’s lawyers, Cecelia Kappel with the New Orleans-based Capital Appeals Project, said Crawford always told her he was going to go home.

“Every time I’d go see him on death row and say we lost another motion, he’d say, ‘I’m going home,’” Kappel said. “He’d just speak it into existence.”

On Nov. 16, 2016 – almost three years from the day Crawford was given the death penalty – the Louisiana Supreme Court vacated Crawford’s conviction and sent the case to the trial court for a new trial.

Crawford’s defense claimed that potential jurors may have been removed from consideration before the trial because of race. The supreme court determined that the trial court conflated the three-step process used to guide courts in evaluating a claim of racial discrimination in jury selection, and that an inadequate remedy existed short of vacating the conviction.

Crawford was freed from jail on a $50,000 bond on Nov. 22, 2016, two days before Thanksgiving. After being released, Crawford spent the next few months finding support from his mother and attorneys as he anticipated word regarding the possibility of a new trial.

Caddo Parish District Attorney James Stewart, who was elected two years after Crawford’s conviction, asked for a new investigation “with an assistant district attorney assigned with no prior experience with the case, to put a new set of eyes onto evidence and procedures that had led to the original prosecution,” a release from his office stated.

Dale Cox, who prosecuted Crawford and served as acting district attorney following the death of D.A. Charles Scott, resigned from the office in December 2015 following Stewart’s election.

Hearings were scheduled for February and March, each one postponed as the D.A.’s office awaited and then reviewed evidence returned from the supreme court.

Then, on Good Friday, the district attorney’s office released a lengthy statement announcing its decision not to retry Crawford in the case of his son’s death.

“In its opinion, the Supreme Court noted the distinguishable time frame it takes for bruises to form on the lips of the child versus the additional time it would take to result in the child's suffocation,” the statement read. “The requirement to exclude every reasonable possibility of how this could occur is a burden the State cannot meet with the evidence available.”

Lacking evidence to prove that Crawford had intentionally and directly caused his son’s death, the next avenue to pursue would have been possible negligent homicide, the release stated.

“While the State feels a reasonable prosecution could be pursued on a charge of criminal negligent homicide, that negligence could extend to other members of the family,” the release stated. “Even if successful on that charge against Crawford, the amount of time he has spent in jail is close to the maximum sentence available if he was convicted.”

The decision not to retry Crawford was based on the office’s duty to bring a charge only when evidence can support it, the statement concluded.

Crawford said he received the news over the phone from his mother.

“I can’t explain in words. When she called me and told me, I really wanted to cry,” he said.

When asked if reparations will be sought on Crawford’s behalf, Kappel said they will pursue all legal options.

“What they did wasn’t right, on a lot of different levels,” she said.

When asked for comment about Crawford possibly seeking restitution, Stewart said “the only truly innocent party is the deceased infant. It seems sinful to try and profit from this tragic loss.”

Five years after it all began, and with a somewhat abrupt end to his case, Crawford, who has a 9-year-old daughter out of state, is looking to leave Shreveport for a while.

“I just want to live and spend as much time as I can with my family, because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about,” he said. “Everything else is materialistic. When everything gets [taken] from you, you just have the people you love. That’s all I care about.”

Editor's note: Sarah Crawford, who wrote this article, has no relation to Rodricus Crawford.